A New Urbanist Responds to Architects' Cliches

Blair Kamin wrote in the Chicago Tribune:

Eric Owen Moss, the director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, went so far as to say that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's decision to bring in the New Urbanists suggested a nostalgic yearning for the "good old days of the Old South."

Kamin was quoting a statement by Moss in the Washington Post:

It's right-wing developer-speak masquerading as populism. The ideological image-making would appeal to a kind of anachronistic Mississippi that yearns for the good old days of the Old South as slow and balanced and pleasing and breezy, and each person knew his or her role.

Hi Eric,

It has taken me a few weeks to simmer down and respond to your comments in the Washington Post regarding the Mississippi Reconstruction Charrette.  I have known you for thirty years now and think of you as being a talented, fair, knowledgeable and tolerant person.

Your comments to the Press a few weeks ago regarding Mississippi and Mississippians were outrageous in their prejudice. These are fellow countrymen and women you were describing. They come in many colors, many political and cultural stripes, and at this time they are deeply in need of our help. To think of them as the children of slave masters, is to think of all westerners as the children of murderous colonials.

How can a profound person like you make such superficial comments? You need to visit the South to recognize that the place is not very different from other parts of our country.

Your comments regarding the new urbanism were equally uninformed. When I need to respond intelligently to a tendency or movement I disagree with, I become expert enough in its nature and character, to outthink it on its own terms. Your understanding of the CNU is superficial at best. And your comments sound remarkably hollow for a director of a School of Architecture.

Let me point out three things that may further illuminate this discussion:

1  The new urbanism is a movement that rejects architecture as the design of isolated and autonomous objects. Instead, it places such objects in a context where they need to be generated in friction with a larger order of design, the making of public space, the landscape, traffic and parking, sustainability protocols, codes, etc.

2  New urbanists believe in the historical continuity of all culture.  We consider it a delusion that architecture can be reinvented every Monday morning by 24 year olds who take a passing fancy to it. We think that typological order, lasting expressive gestures and best practices over the centuries matter immensely. A profession without its own internal structure has nothing to profess. It is running on empty.

We are tolerant of work such as yours, but consider that a world reduced to it would be impoverished at best.  The twenty first century is eclectic to its core. Therefore, many architectures must be allowed to exist, not only the modernist experimental variety. And all of them should be considered significant, depending on where and how they are applied.

3  New urbanists do not consider their student days the pinnacle of their professional existence. They see themselves as eager and capable to learn and to engage society for a lifetime, in all of its challenges.  To be of service, to listen, to teach and to learn by doing is a principal new urbanist ideal.

I am telling you all of this, because it was for reasons such as these, that we have been recognized for what we do in the world, and were invited to Mississippi by its Governor after Katrina.  After the worst natural catastrophe in our nation’s history he needed substantive advice on the reconstruction of a vast area encompassing 11 municipalities.  What he saw in us was a group of 120 people, paired with 100 local professionals who could gather for a week on short notice and in many cases pro bono, to deliver substantial advice. He realized that we are architects and city builders, we respect the fact that forced change is about balancing tradition with newness, and that we can be trusted with the complexities and sensitivities of the public process.  We are the only professional group in the United States that could respond rapidly to the nature and the complexity of the problem of reconstruction on the Coast.

If you are open to absorb this brief explanation of new urbanist motivations, you may acknowledge how silly it is to dismiss this movement on stylistic grounds or any other simplistic basis.  As long as you and those teaching and practicing around you would not be capable or charitable enough to engage the interests of Mississippi at this time, you should at least acknowledge that it is legitimate for some one else to do so.

I respect your freedom to do what you do. Please at least, extend the same respect to us.  And if you are tempted to engage in a broader debate on this, I would be delighted to do so personally and/or by fielding a team to engage you whenever and wherever you choose.

In the interest of theological accommodation,  I am also sending you under a separate cover a copy of the book, The Charter of the New Urbanism, as a gift to the Sci Arc library.  I hope you read it first before you deposit it there.

Sincerely,

Stefanos [Polyzoides
Moule & Polyzoides Architects]